by Paul Dini
That was the truly astonishing thing about him—of every wild-and-crazy, larger-than-life, multicolor criminal that had ever made a splash in Gotham City, only the Joker had managed to conceal his identity completely, including his given name. It was as if he had just sprung up out of nowhere, coming into existence simply because he’d felt like it. No one had ever known him as anything but the Joker.
Everyone came from somewhere. But Harleen thought if anyone could have magicked himself into existence by sheer force of will, it was this clown.
There was one more hour left in the workday after the staff meeting. Harleen used it to write reports, make corrections, reread patient files. Then she finally gave up and reorganized her Joker materials in the special ring-binder devoted exclusively to her most challenging patient. There wasn’t much in it yet besides photocopies of newspaper articles and her private preliminary notes.
Dr. Leland asked the staff to digitize their notes for easy access from the Arkham cloud. But Harleen always kept hardcopy backups. Any cloud could be hacked, and if a hacker altered or erased data, the original was gone for good—unless it existed as something other than bits or bytes. There were off-line archives but Harleen had been through enough computer meltdowns to know there was no such thing as too many backups.
Harleen also felt it was wise not to put everything in the cloud. Her private notes on her patients were just that—private—and they couldn’t be archived because they were dynamic, changing as she learned more. She had a feeling her private notes on the Joker would be extremely dynamic.
Harleen’s desire to go down to the Joker’s cell was so strong now she thought it must have been radiating from her like heat. She half-expected Dr. Leland to suddenly barge in and say she had decided to cancel the proposed treatment plan because she thought Harleen was too personally invested and who did she think she was anyway, Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung? Arkham Asylum wasn’t a place for breakthroughs; it was a storage facility for people too toxic for a standard human warehouse. People like the Joker had to be handled like the hazardous materials they were.
She heard Dr. Leland lock up for the night, then walk past without stopping. Still, Harleen made herself sit at her desk until she heard Dr. Leland’s car leave the parking lot. Then she picked up her tablet and her ring-binder and walked sedately through Arkham down to the Joker’s cell in the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement, taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
Well, of course she would come back, he’d never doubted it, the Joker thought when Angus told him the lovely Dr. Quinzel was on her way. First thing that morning, he’d asked the orderlies—politely, even—to tell him if or when the good doctor was headed in his direction. Now he was sorry he’d said if; it made him sound like he wasn’t sure of himself. Fortunately, Angus was a moron who lived in a nuance-free world—anything subtler than a pie in the face was wasted on him.
But never mind; Harleen Quinzel was coming back because she was well and truly hooked. She was treating him now, and what a treat she would be. Such a relief not to have to tolerate those other sorry schlubs that passed for psychiatrists at Arkham, Dr. Leland excluded. She most definitely wasn’t a schlub—he had to watch his step around Joanie La-La Leland. In fact, he’d probably see her a little more often now—she’d be checking up on Dr. Quinzel, monitoring her work, making sure this wasn’t a mistake like the Looney Ladies club. He’d have to be careful.
Did she know how gorgeous she was? Or was she one of those women who couldn’t see her real reflection in the mirror? So many beautiful women couldn’t. According to the information he’d wheedled from the orderlies, Dr. Quinzel had been a gymnast; gymnastics was full of knockouts with body issues, reinforced by the very nature of the sport.
Why had Dr. Quinzel never competed in the Olympics, he wondered. Had she tried out and not been good enough? Did the failure eat at her? Or had she never had the chance because Mommy and Daddy couldn’t afford the right coaches?
Maybe her parents hadn’t even cared—how classic. Heartless mothers, absent fathers, abusive brothers, twisted sisters—thanks to screwed-up families, there would always be an endless supply of potential hench-wenches to choose from.
At the same time, however, neurotic women were so much trouble. They always wanted to talk about their feelings and your feelings and their feelings about your feelings and your feelings about their feelings about your feelings, ad nauseam. It wasted time better spent devising and executing crimes outrageous enough to keep the twenty-four-hour news cycle abuzz for weeks, and have all the nobodies speaking your name in an awed whisper.
But this was in the outside world, where he wasn’t. He was buried alive in the loneliest cell on the lowest level of Arkham Asylum, courtesy of that caped buffoon, Batman.
Well, Batman didn’t know it yet but he was going to learn that even the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement of Arkham Asylum wasn’t deep enough. Not when there was a neurotic beauty on the premises who wanted only to help him.
And here she was now, with good old Angus the orderly bringing a chair in so the good doctor wouldn’t have to sully her behind by sitting on the bed where every night he lay in his criminally insane repose and dreamed his criminally insane dreams.
Angus offered to stay but the very professional Dr. Quinzel shooed him out in the name of doctor–patient confidentiality. She sat down, crossed her long, graceful legs, and finally deigned to look directly at him.
“Are you up to a civilized exchange this evening or are you still not using your indoor voice?”
The question almost brought tears of joyful laughter to his eyes. Bless her beautiful, professional, clueless little heart.
* * *
“Are you up to a civilized exchange this evening or are you still not using your indoor voice?”
The Joker didn’t answer right away. Harleen blinked; were those tears in his eyes? Or was that just a trick of the light?
“I was really afraid you might not come back after I treated you so shamefully,” he said after a few seconds. “As much as I hoped you’d let me apologize, I wouldn’t have blamed you for wanting nothing more to do with me. When you didn’t come back last night, I tried to tell myself it was simply that you’d already gone home. I didn’t sleep very well.”
It must have been a trick of the light, Harleen thought; the Joker’s voice was serious but steady, no cracking or breaking. Not that he’d have fooled her with crocodile tears. His face was so utterly forlorn, though, she found it hard to look at him; she gazed down at her tablet instead and pretended to take notes. The man had so much presence and vitality—the humiliation must have been unbearable, as bad as physical pain.
Harleen cleared her throat. “How well do you sleep normally?”
“I don’t know what that means,” the Joker said in the same low, serious voice. He sat up on the edge of his bed and rested his elbows on his knees. “‘Normally,’ that is. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything ‘normally.’”
“I meant, what’s normal for you,” Harleen said, suppressing a smile. Contrite, humble, but still trying to take control of the conversation; it was probably a habit. Getting the upper hand was how prisoners survived. And crucial to her understanding of him was knowing he saw Arkham as a prison in hospital scrubs. (That was good, she thought, writing it down; she had to use it in the book.) “Do you usually sleep well?”
The Joker tilted his head, gazing at her in a speculative way. Trying to gauge something about her—the word that appeared most often in his files was “manipulative.” What might he be trying to discern?
“That’s a good question,” he said after a few seconds. “Do I wake up refreshed, singing with the birds every morning? Hardly. I doubt anyone’s life is that good. But here in Arkham, I don’t have very much to occupy my mind so I’m prone to things weighing on me.”
“What kinds of things?” Harleen asked, using the stylus on her tablet screen.
“The usual suspects,” said the Joker. “Things I’ve don
e. Or not done. Things done to me. Or not.”
Did he think she was an amateur, Harleen wondered? She frowned down at her tablet. Someday, someone would make a stylus that didn’t make her handwriting look as if she were recovering from a stroke. Until then, she’d stick with low tech. She swapped the tablet for the binder.
“Go on,” she said, pencil poised over a blank page. “Do any particular things weigh on you more than others?”
“Other than the fact that my misdeeds are without number?” the Joker said brightly. “Nah, not really.”
“What about things that have happened to you?” Harleen asked. “Any of those repeating on you like bad chilli?”
The Joker looked at her disapprovingly. “Isn’t that a bit racist?”
Harleen smiled with half her mouth. Some patients would pounce on the most ridiculous things in an effort to throw their doctor off-balance. “Any cuisine can suffer from failure of execution. Bad curry. Bad pizza. Bad apple pie.”
The Joker put his head in his hands and stayed that way for so long, Harleen worried she had somehow hit a nerve. She was about to ask him what was wrong when he suddenly sat up straight and said, “Damn, I miss that so much.”
Harleen blinked at him. “Bad apple pie?”
“Intelligent conversation. Banter.” He moved to lean back against the wall. “I swear sometimes I feel my own brain atrophying, my mind shrinking. It takes a lot more than crossword puzzles and killer sudoku to keep an intellect alive and kicking. My other doctors hardly ever said anything to me about—well, anything. We never talked, never conversed. They’d just look at me, check the box next to ‘still crazy,’ and they were done for the day.
“And before they put me down here in isolation,” he went on before Harleen could respond, “it wasn’t much better. I mean, who among the other nut jobs in this joint could I have even a halfway intelligent conversation with—a serial killer? An arsonist? Half the loonies in Arkham hear voices so it’s impossible to get a word in edgeways. And it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort anyway.”
Harleen opened her mouth to say something but he was too fast for her again.
“And don’t get me started about the so-called fairer sex,” he went on. “The choice of female companionship is strictly limited in here. Now, I’m not one of those men who has problems with women being who they are or asserting themselves. But I’d rather talk to a woman who has more to say than ‘I did-unt mean to!’ Or ‘Shiny! Shiny!’ And a woman who calls herself Poison Ivy and grows plants in her freakin’ hair probably hasn’t read any good books lately!”
Harleen tried pressing her lips tightly together but it didn’t work. She burst out laughing. The Joker laughed a little himself as he watched her; she could practically feel his gaze as a physical pressure.
“Well, thank God,” the Joker said as she wound down. “I was afraid you had no sense of humor.”
“Now what would make you think a thing like that?” Harleen asked, still a little breathless.
“I dunno,” he said, shrugging. “Maybe because you hardly ever smile. Or because the only way you ever react to what I tell you is to make notes.” He smiled in a way that was actually gentle, not much like his standard Joker grin. Harleen’s heart went thump! “It’s nice to know I can make you laugh.”
“I’m not here so you can make me laugh,” she said, sobering quickly.
“I meant, as opposed to driving you away to avoid therapy.” The Joker leaned forward as he looked into her face with an unguarded earnestness that made her heart go thump! again. “To be brutally honest, I’d still rather avoid therapy. But seeing you react to me so positively—I can’t remember the last time that happened. It makes me want to believe that maybe what I’ve needed all along is the right person to help me look myself in the eye and see what’s really there. I don’t need a lot of yak-yak-yak about pathologies and disorders. I need the right person to connect with, who gets me so well that I can make her laugh, not run away.”
Abruptly, there was a knock on the door and Angus poked his head in. “Everything okay, Dr. Quinzel? I thought I heard something.”
It was all Harleen could do not to scream at him and whack him in the face with her binder. “You heard no good reason to interrupt a scheduled session of therapy,” she told him, her voice tight with indignation. “Unless you hear me explicitly call for help, don’t barge in here again. Got that?”
Angus nodded solemnly and withdrew.
“Oh, my,” the Joker said, wide-eyed. “I think you scared him.”
“He’s lucky that’s all I did,” Harleen said darkly.
“I’ve never seen Angus scared of anyone.” The Joker paused. “Well, except Mary Louise Dahl, but she creeps everyone out.”
“Very funny,” Harleen said. “We’ve already established that you can make me laugh so it isn’t necessary to keep doing it. If you can connect with me, then connect with me instead of deflecting with humor. Ya get me, Mistah J?”
The Joker burst out laughing.
Oh, God, why did I do that? Harleen thought, appalled at herself. What had possessed her to do exactly what Dr. Leland had told her not to? She hadn’t intended—
I did-unt mean to!
If she’d caught Mary Louise Dahl’s crazy, Harleen thought, she would kill herself.
“Dr. Quinzel, you are full of surprises!” the Joker said, wiping his eyes. “Where did that come from?”
“Brooklyn.” Harleen cleared her throat again and spoke in her normal voice. “Now, where were we?”
* * *
Despite her misstep with the tough-Brooklyn-cookie voice, the session was brilliantly fruitful, so much so that Harleen let it run thirty minutes longer than she had originally planned—and then discovered that she had actually let it go on an hour longer. That was Angus’s fault, Harleen decided. His interruption had thrown her timing off.
“I’ve enjoyed this more than I thought I would,” the Joker said as she got to her feet and gathered her things together.
“I’m glad you feel that way,” Harleen told him. “We’ll be doing it again tomorrow.”
“I suppose I’ll have to wait all day for you,” he said, a bit sadly.
“That’s the arrangement,” Harleen said. “If you show improvement, however, the schedule might also change for the better. You never know.”
“I’ll do my best, Dr. Quinzel,” said the Joker. “I pro—”
“Don’t.” Harleen put up a hand. “Don’t promise anything. It’s too early for promises. Change takes time, even when you’re ready and willing.”
“I look forward to our next meeting,” the Joker said. “No matter how hard it is to wait.”
Harleen headed for the door, then stopped and turned back to him. “By the way—what you said when you made me laugh?”
“My rant du jour?” He smiled, obviously pleased with himself.
“I think if we recorded that and played it for juvenile first-offenders, it might be more effective at scaring them straight than any other program the social workers have tried.”
“Well!” The Joker folded his arms, pretending to be deeply offended. “I’ll thank you not to repeat that slander where anyone can hear it. You’ll ruin my reputation as a bad influence.”
“Good night, Mr. J,” she said, resisting the urge to use her tough-Brooklyn-cookie voice.
“Until tomorrow, my dear Dr. Quinzel,” said the Joker.
My dear Dr. Quinzel crept all the way up to the edge of her rule as to what he could call her, but, Harleen decided, it stopped short of going over. She’d allow it.
She also liked the way it sounded.
The Joker collapsed on the bed, wrung out but satisfied. This was going to be beyond good. It would be a major event, a genuine extravaganza—
“Excuse me, Joker, I’m just coming in to get the chair,” Angus said. “Since she’s gone, I’m not interrupting.”
“Make it quick, you’re interrupting my therapeutic train of thought,
” the Joker informed him loftily.
“You missed your calling,” Angus said. “That performance deserves an Oscar.”
“As if I care what you think,” the Joker said, waving one hand dismissively.
“How long can you keep it up?” Angus asked. “A week? Three weeks? A month?” Pause. “You’ll break that poor girl’s heart.”
The Joker made a disdainful noise. “Everyone’s a critic.”
* * *
Joan Leland wanted to be reassured by Harleen Quinzel’s daily reports. From the beginning, they were enthusiastic accounts rich with detail about the banter she and the Joker engaged in, all their conversations heavily annotated. She could imagine Harleen at home with her laptop, typing up her notes, adding insights as they occurred to her. There seemed to be a lot of those. The reports arrived promptly; every morning when she got to work, one was waiting in her inbox.
The length of some reports made Dr. Leland wonder if Harleen was getting enough sleep. But she didn’t look sleep deprived—she showed up every day looking fresh and energetic, as if she were sure that something good was going to happen before the day was out. Seeing her like that was worrisome.
Dr. Leland talked with the nurses as well as the orderlies who were on duty during Dr. Quinzel’s sessions. The orderlies were all certain the Joker was having a ball playing Dr. Quinzel, because that was what he did. He had nothing else to do, and nothing to lose.
Maybe she shouldn’t let it continue, Dr. Leland thought. Dr. Quinzel didn’t deserve to be toyed with by a psychopath. No one did.
Except according to the nurses, the Joker actually showed improvement. Not all the nurses, of course, some of the long-timers had seen too much. But none of them were especially credulous. The nurse who took his vitals every day reported he was polite. When he came down with a bacterial infection that put him in isolation in the medical ward for a few days, there had been no practical jokes, no booby traps, no physical assaults, and no verbal abuse, just please, thank you, and even excuse me.